They'll each offer some great photo opportunities.

Be sure to share some here.

I'm a registered MSA rally marshall and a photographer. Having performed both rolls at many a Wales Rally GB, the best advice I can give is to make sure you position yourself on the inside of bends. If you position yourself on the outside, if the cars don't get you, flying debris of varying sizes up to huge rocks, will.

Wear a Hi-Vis vest so you can be seen. Cammo clothing is not sensible.

Maintain a safe distance between yourself and the cars, and any possible trajectory that they may take when it all goes wrong.

From the photographic point of view, images of cars coming towards you are superior to those passing in front or going away.

Use Tv priority and set a reasonably fast shutter speed, then increase it. They are travelling faster than you think at between 130 - 150 Km/hr on the straight.

On the stage, you'll get good shots of the cars. If you want images of the drivers, get yourself to the start line where they will queue before being released into the stage, or to the finish line where the top drivers will be interviewed by TV crews.

Above all else, enjoy the rally.

That's exactly what I meant by suggesting you wait until you understand (fully) why you might need a filter. In the case of ND grads, if you buy only one, it will probably be the wrong one when you come to need it.

If you perceive that you need ND grads, you'll likely need a set, and maybe a set of each, hard and soft. I'll leave you to discover the difference between them.

My advice is to wait until you know what you need, and understand why you need it/them. You'll then know what you need is not necessarily what you believe you want.

About the only filters you may need for digital nowadays are a circular polariser and maybe some ND grads or ND filters. If you believe that attaching a filter to the front of a lens protects it in some way, then UV filters might be useful.

Personally, I've never seen the sense in putting a £5 piece of glass on the front of a £500 - £1000 lens.

If you drop a lens, it's likely to get damaged, filter or no filter.

It being a Cannon, you'll get a lot of 'bang for your buck'.

That being the case, it is little surprise that some lenses appear to under perform compared to expectations ...

A lens designed to be softer at wide apertures for portraiture is not going to compare favourably with a macro lens for instance, given the same test conditions.

As Disraeli once said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.

I've traditionally shot RAW. Recently though, I came across a situation that demanded JPG.

I was shooting an equestrian event with my son and to avoid having to convert raw files to jpg prior to printing, we shot jpg.

Later, during the same shoot, we switched to RAW+ as a trial. The resulting RAW images produced better images after post processing than the jpg's did without.

The difference however might only be due to the jpg settings in camera.

Buy it quick, don't let the other interested party get their mits on it first.

Who wouldn't give their right arm for A3 prints with no magnification. Awesome.

Pssst: Is he still here?

If you can see a mark on the sensor, and you can't remove it by any normally accepted means, it's probably a scratch. Dust particles that look awful in images are near invisible on the sensor to the naked eye.

Nicely done. I think you should disable the right click option when your images display to prevent anybody from stealing them.